CHARLES TAYLOR'S TERROR TIES Ace of Diamonds (Reverend Jackson)

Name the following despot: In 1991, he invaded a neighboring country, where his men committed wholesale looting and massive atrocities. In 1998, he personally met with a senior Al Qaeda operative now listed as one of the FBI's 25 "Most Wanted" terrorists. He is the single greatest threat to the stability of one of the most important oil-producing regions in the world. Saddam Hussein? No, Charles Taylor of Liberia.

If the Bush administration decides to send a peacekeeping force to Liberia, in other words, it will be safeguarding not only humanitarian concerns but national security ones as well. Yet, even as the Bush administration contemplates such a mission, it has failed to make this point, largely acceding to the conservative mantra that the United States has no strategic interests in the region.

They're wrong. Start with Al Qaeda. In September 1998, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a top Al Qaeda operative, visited Liberia and met with Taylor and senior members of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the vicious Taylorcontrolled militia that invaded Sierra Leone in 1991 to take over the country's diamond mines. Abdullah trained Al Qaeda recruits in explosives in Afghanistan, participated in operations against Americans in Somalia, and helped plan the East African embassy bombings in 1998. The U.S. government currently offers a $25 million reward for information leading to his arrest. And Abdullah's meeting with Taylor was no social visit. Rather it led to a relationship in which Al Qaeda bought large quantities of diamonds from the RUF in exchange for weapons and cash. The operation, which peaked in the months before September 11, 2001, is believed to have offered Al Qaeda a way to convert its assets into a form that could be moved across borders more easily. The Taylor–Al Qaeda relationship has been carefully documented by The Washington Post's Douglas Farah, by a yearlong European intelligence investigation, and, most recently, in a 100-page report the nongovernmental organization Global Witness released in April. Liberia's links to Al Qaeda, in other words, are far more well-documented than Iraq's. And, yet, they have never been cited by anyone in the Bush administration.

Then there's oil. Since 1989, when Taylor started Liberia's civil war, conflict has spread to neighboring Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire. While all these states are west of the big oil-producing countries along the Gulf of Guinea from which the United States projects it will receive some 20 percent of its oil imports in a few years there are plausible scenarios under which the chaos could spread further. Nobody would have predicted that Taylor's original 1989 Christmas Eve insurrection would one day engulf Côte d'Ivoire, long a rock of stability in West Africa, but now it has. And, as The Economist pointed out this week, "if Côte d'Ivoire were to go the way of Liberia, it would cripple" Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, bringing the conflict to the doorstep of Nigeria, the already precarious oil-rich hegemony of the region.

But the Bush administration's failure to articulate the stakes in Liberia is not its only mistake. The recent focus on whether the United States will send troops has obscured the more important question: whether Taylor, the first sitting head of state since Slobodan Milosevic to be indicted for war crimes, will escape prosecution. While President Bush has called for Taylor to leave the country, he has said little about bringing him to trial for his more than a decade of mass murder. But West Africa will not breathe easily until Taylor is tried, convicted, and imprisoned.

Since Taylor and the RUF launched their civil war in Sierra Leone in 1991 and became internationally famous for hacking the limbs off their victims and forcing drug-addled child-conscripts to murder their parents, the United States has pursued two very different approaches toward them one of engagement, amnesty, and appeasement and one of pressure and even prosecution. In 1999, the Clinton administration, at the behest of the State Department's African Affairs bureaucrats and Jesse Jackson (who had become a personal friend of Taylor's in his role as Bill Clinton's envoy to Africa), helped negotiate the disastrous Lomé Accord, which gave the RUF full amnesty for its crimes and installed Foday Sankoh, the RUF's monstrous leader, as vice president of Sierra Leone. As one American official told The New Republic in 2000, "The message we sent with Lomé is that you can terrorize your way to power."

WND, March 12, 2002 in part wrote: 'Shakedown' excerpt covers Jackson's dealings with thugs as Clinton 'envoy' No one really knows who paid for the April 18–19, 1998, conference, called hastily by Jackson upon his return from the presidential safari on April 2. But if previous PUSH conferences are any gauge, Jackson spent a good $400,000 on the event. "The general perception in the Liberian community was that Jackson was a paid lobbyist for Charles Taylor," says Greaves. Many sources said they believed Romeo Horton transferred money to Jackson to pay for the conference, an allegation Jackson vigorously denies.

"Rainbow/PUSH paid for that conference," Jackson claims. "Taylor paid for his own delegation. People who came from the U.S. paid their own way. It was not a Liberian government-sponsored conference. We got absolutely no money from the government of Liberia." Jackson does acknowledge that Taylor must have paid for the live video feed from Monrovia for the keynote event of the conference, "but it was a two-way thing. We paid the U.S. part," he says.

Jackson was immediately sensitive to charges that Taylor had financed the conference and attacked the allegations without even being asked about them. He told the conferees: "This is no assignment from our government or consultant's fee [from Liberia]. I do this because I want to see Liberians live again."

But Jackson's protests of innocence reminded Harry Greaves of an earlier incident, when a coalition of Liberian human rights groups pleaded with Jackson to support their cause by appearing at a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral in 1990.

The group, called LICORE (Liberian Committee for Relief, Resettlement and Reconstruction) was seeking to raise money to send relief supplies to refugees from the civil war. "We weren't taking sides; we wanted to bring Liberians together," Greaves says. "We went to Jesse because he had just waged a prominent presidential campaign. We asked him to make a speech during the prayer service at the cathedral." After Jackson responded favorably, Greaves recalls meeting with a Jackson aide at the Operation PUSH office in Washington, D.C., a few days before the event. "I met with a director who was handling the arrangements. Our invitations were already going out, featuring Jackson's appearance. At the last minute, he said that Jackson required us to make an up front payment of $50,000 as a speaker's fee." The group could not make the payment, and Jackson cancelled his appearance without another word.

That July, as accusations began to circulate that he was getting financial assistance from Charles Taylor, Jackson appointed a Nigerian woman named Odusola Blessing Johnson to head up a new PUSH chapter in Houston, Texas, known as People United to Save Humanity in Nigeria. Why PUSH needed a chapter devoted to Nigeria, and why Jackson chose to base it in the capital of the U.S. oil industry, is a mystery. Ms. Johnson's PUSH chapter vanished from the Texas corporate registry within months of being established, just as the Nevada-registered front company San Francisco Oil had done the previous year. When I called the Houston office of Rainbow/PUSH in November 2001, I was told that William Paul headed Jackson's effort in Texas and that no one had ever heard of Ms. Johnson. But sources knowledgeable about the Nigerian oil ministry told me that Odusola Blessing Johnson had business ties to a man named Jackson Gaius-Obasecki, the marketing manager of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Gauis-Obasecki was responsible for doling out lucrative oil contracts to friends and cronies. On May 29, 1999, the day the newly elected Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo was inaugurated, Gaius-Obaseki was promoted to group managing director of NNPC. It was a small world.

CUT

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